


Going to a Dance

by Bluewolf458



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-21
Updated: 2013-10-21
Packaged: 2017-12-30 01:43:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1012533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bluewolf458/pseuds/Bluewolf458
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blair explains something to Jim</p>
            </blockquote>





	Going to a Dance

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Sentinel Thursday

"What the... This doesn't make sense!" Jim slapped the book he was reading shut and tossed in onto the small table in front of him.

"Huh?" Blair glanced up from his laptop, his attention drawn more by the 'thud' of the book hitting the table than Jim's comment. He thought desperately for a moment, trying to remember what Jim had said. "What doesn't make sense?"

Jim sighed and reached for the book. He flicked though it quickly. "To give you the background - it's set on a battlefield."

"And?"

Jim found the page. "There are a couple of sentries. One is manning a radio, the other is watching the landscape through binoculars."

"Right."

"The guy with the binoculars says, 'Hey, Tom, alert HQ. The enemy's going to a dance' - I ask you, Chief, does that make any sort of sense?"

Blair looked at him, frowning thoughtfully. "In a way... In a way it does."

"It does?" As always, Jim was startled by how easily Blair could take something apparently crazy and make sense of it.

"Who's the POV character?"

"The radio operator - the story is in first person with him as narrator."

Blair nodded. "In that case - it's a mondegreen."

"Mondewhat?"

"Mondegreen. The word dates from the mid-1950s - someone wrote an article for Harper's Magazine about what she called 'The Death of Lady Mondegreen'. Apparently when she was a kid, she'd heard a poem -

"Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,  
Oh where hae ye been?  
They hae slain the Earl o' Moray  
And Lady Mondegreen

"and it was years later that she discovered that the last line was really 'And laid him on the green.' She'd totally misheard the words. Her article gave a name to the phenomenon of misheard words.

"It's quite common. Maybe one of the best known is from Jimi Hendrix's song Purple Haze - The line is 'Excuse me while I kiss the sky'; so many people heard it as 'Scuse me while I kiss this guy' that sometimes when he sang it he played up to the mondegreen and did kiss a guy.

"Songs are a great source for mishearing something. Fitting the words to the music - sometimes a word gets stretched out, or or two or three words are slurred together... You know the show 'Olive, the other reindeer' from last year?"

"Yes," Jim agreed.

"That was a mondegreen from the original 'Rudolf the red-nosed reindeer'."

"Oh."

"I think if you read on, you'll find that Tom misheard what the other guy actually said. I'd guess the writer of your book took it from another quite well-known British mondegreen. The actual sentence sent by an officer was 'Send reinforcements, we're going to advance' but the message was heard as 'Send three and fourpence, we're going to a dance'... though I've always suspected that that one was apocryphal."

"Okay, Chief. You can stop blinding me with science."

"'Course, with your hearing, I doubt that you ever mishear anything," Blair muttered as he turned his attention back to his laptop.

Jim grinned. Admitting it would give Blair reason to think up another test. That being so - Jim wasn't going to admit that - occasionally - he did.

Reverend blue jeans, anyone?

**Author's Note:**

> Just in case anyone didn't get the final mondegreen, it should be 'Forever in blue jeans' - which was my personal one.


End file.
